Citigroup Inc. faces a potential cyberattack every 20 seconds, according to Don Callahan, the head of global operations and technology at the bank and financial services company.
The Citi executive spoke June 20 at Manhattanville College for the inaugural TAMI Talk, an acronym for technology, advertising, media and information. The talks are an initiative of The Business Council of Westchester to bring leaders in those four sectors together for discussions.
Callahan has been with Citi since 2007. He”™s also a liberal arts graduate of Manhattanville College and on its board of trustees.
In a speech that focused mainly on the role technology plays in the financial industry, he described recent innovations in so called FinTech as especially exciting ”“ if not also somewhat scary.
He mentioned the cyberattack statistic when asked whether he thought large companies were winning the “war against cybercrime.”
Of those constant cyberattack attempts, Citi faces a “serious, credible attack,” about once per week, Callahan said. He said Citi works closely with the federal government and other large banks to track and prevent those threats.
Part of protecting data at the consumer level are those new “very annoying” security chips in credit cards, as Callahan described them. The higher level of encryption in the cards means more waiting at the checkout line right now, Callahan said, but it is necessary for security.
“We”™re going to upgrade those,” Callahan said. “But this is the future of what you need to do.”
Callahan referenced the cyberattack on Target Corp. in 2013, which accessed credit card data for up to 40 million customers, to show how serious the threat can be.
“Target was a chip shot,” Callahan said, noting the opening for the hack came through an HVAC system.
“It took them two years to set the whole thing up,” he said. “How do I know that”™s not going on at Citi right now? It really scares me to no end.”
To give an idea of just how large the digital operation at Citi is, Callahan said the company employs more programmers than Google or Microsoft.
“We need to think about: How can we digitize absolutely everything?” Callahan said. “So that we can give a level of service that”™s available 24/7.”
For years, Citi has built its own data centers to carry out those digitization efforts, but Callahan discussed the shift that Citi, along with most other large financial institutions, is continually making toward cloud storage.
“That old model we had was very expensive,” Callahan said. “Since I took over, we”™ve gone from 70 data centers down to 20. My plan is to take those 20 down to 10.”
But where all that financial data go ”“ amounts of real money with lots and lots of zeros on the end ”“ isn”™t necessarily a simple one.
Callahan mentioned directly one company with a significant amount of cloud computing power available that is looking to grow its banking portfolio: Amazon.com Inc.
The Wall Street Journal reported in February that Amazon Web Services, the company”™s cloud computing arm, was pitching its servers to banks such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Callahan said he couldn”™t get into the details of those talks, because they are still “working our way through with regulators,” but did discuss the concept in general.
“Whether that”™s a good idea to have your money sitting in Amazon, and most people say it is not,” Callahan said, citing a weather-driven outage of Amazon Web Services in Australia just earlier that week.
“So we”™ve got to have a service level, but knowing Amazon, they will figure it out,” Callahan said. “I”™m confident if we can think of a problem, someone is going to think of a solution.”
Callahan also discussed growing automation and robotics in the finance industry. He said it would likely lead to a huge shift for banks, away from transactional services to more of a focus on providing advice.
“We”™re going to see jobs disappearing like crazy,” he said. “I think it”™s going to be a good topic for all of us to figure out: Can we make sure that people we are educating, like at Manhattanville, are in the thought leadership positions?”
The next TAMI Talk is planned for October with Michael Dunn, the senior vice president of innovation development at Georgia-Pacific LLC.
